GAME CLEAR No. 131 -- Art Style: Pictobits

Art Style: Pictobits (2009, DSiWare)

Developer: Skip Ltd.
Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Platform: Nintendo DSi
Clear Date: 4/20/23

Bits and Bops

While playing Dragon Quest V on my Nintendo DSi, I was reminded of the fact that I own a small handful of digital titles on the first Nintendo handheld to support such content delivery. Most of the games I had were honestly not noteworthy, but Pictobits was an exception. It’s a great (if derivative) little puzzler with bangin’ tunes, and with its stylus-only controls, it’s DS as hell. It was nice to return to and roll credits on this now forgotten (and delisted) game.

Mechanically, Pictobits is a pretty basic falling block, match four puzzler. Unlike Tetris or Dr. Mario, it is separated into discrete, finishable levels the object of which is to complete a piece of pixel art on the top screen of the DS. Each puzzle starts with a number of colored blocks (bits, you might say) on the bottom screen. You can gather a handful of these with the stylus and then place them anywhere on the touch screen. If you create a chunk or line of four or more blocks of the same color by aligning bits with the shapes falling from the top, that chunk will break into its constituent pixels and fly to the top screen. Once there, the bits will fill in the empty spaces of the same color in the sprite(s) you’re attempting to complete. Simple and engaging. It probably goes without saying, but if you allow the bits to stack to the top of the bottom screen, you lose.

But the fun is in the combos. If you manage to make another match while the first one is moving to the top screen, you’ll start a combo, and twice the number of matched bits will be sent to the top, then 4x and so on with successive chains. Alternatively, chains can be created cascade style. When a chunk of a falling block is matched, the parts of it that were not part of the match will subsequently fast-fall to the bottom to become part of the pile of bits. If, however, they align with the appropriate bits on their way down, this will also count as a combo continuation. Prudent placement of bits below a match you intend to create can buy you precious time to begin working on another falling block. No matter how you do it, mastering these chains is essential in later levels, where blocks fall faster and the images you’re trying to render grow larger and more complex. You can buy yourself a little time by tapping the POW button to clear a couple rows at the bottom (and collapse higher ones), but this will reduce the number of bits you can pick up at once, making your life harder.

Left at that, the game would’ve been compelling and fun. A sort of Picross cousin in which your reward is a little image. However, as Nintendo is wont to do, they leaned heavily on their 8-bit days for this game, and every stage is themed after a game from the NES catalog. This works out really well for a couple reasons: look and sound.

Visually, it’s a smart call to make because NES sprites could only contain a maximum of four colors. This keeps the number of colors needed to complete a stage under control even if multiple sprites are involved. This can sometimes mean that you gather all the pixels you need of one color early on (after which clearing them will progress your combo chain but will not fill in the image), but overall it synergizes well with the concept. It’s also nice because I am a stupid idiot who is not immune to nostalgia, and I find it a little more compelling to be drawing Mario or Pit or whoever instead of a banana or a bicycle or what have you.

Perhaps even more important, though, is the fact that most first-party NES games had terrific soundtracks. Each stage in Pictobits features music from its corresponding game as arranged by Japanese chiptune band YMCK. These arrangements really kick ass and elevate the experience a great deal. They start out super subdued (often just the bassline and maybe percussion) and swell to the tunes you know and love as you get closer to completing the puzzle. After reaching the point of familiarity, they amp things up with tasteful embellishments, fun solos, or even entire new sections. Even at their most maximal, it never feels like YMCK took their creative liberties too far. They just made some sick arrangements of classic tunes, and even if you never play this game, you owe it to yourself to give the OST a listen if you’re into that sort of thing.

And on that note, the state of this game’s playability is pretty rough. It’s no longer for sale anywhere, but that’s not such a big deal – just pirate it. The problem is it really relies on the precision touch controls afforded by the DS*. That makes it a tricky proposition on PC and probably even mobile without a stylus, I would think. If you have the eminently hackable 3DS, you’re in business, but those won’t last forever. That means this game really has a shelf life in a certain sense. It’s so hardware-reliant that a port seems extremely unlikely, and a sequel perhaps even moreso. It’s a shame because the Switch’s higher resolution could probably make a version of this game feasible even with finger-based touch controls.

It’s also a shame because a port or sequel could fix this game’s most egregious flaw, which is that to the best of my knowledge it has no accessibility features for colorblind players. It’s kind of shocking how bad accessibility was even as recently as 2009, but that seems like a mistake that would not be repeated now.

Alas, knowing Nintendo, we will never see something like this again. If you have the ability to play it, though, give it a go while you still can. And hey, at least we can appreciate its soundtrack forever.

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* This is something I think about a lot, honestly: the preservation nightmare that accompanies novel or unique control schemes. I don’t think that problem should discourage the use thereof; it’s just something that kicks around my brain. Maybe I’ll write about that some day.